It was one of the most in-demand eateries in London, with the phone ringing every few minutes with someone trying to make a booking.

Exclusive and quirky, The Shed at Dulwich was rated Number One on TripAdvisor, with dozens of reviews praising its original approach.

Only problem was, it wasn’t real.

The whole thing was faked as a practical joke, to prove how easily it can be to manipulate things online. And the only time it did open, it served microwaved ready meals from Iceland.

We caught up with Vice writer Oobah Butler to find out how he pulled it off.

He got the idea after making £10 a pop writing fake reviews for restaurants, and ‘seeing it turn their fortunes around’.

So he decided to take things one step further.

On the opening night he served ready meals (Picture: Oobah Butler/ VICE)

Using artfully photographed pictures of sponge, bleach capsules and his foot posed to look appettising, he created a website with meals named after moods such as lust, comfort and contemplation.

To get around the issue of the address, he gave the road name and said it was appointment only.

Once verified, he recruited friends to start writing the fake reviews – each sent a list of ‘consistency pointers’ to make the review seem legit, like making minor complaints that didn’t detract from the overall endorsement.

He had to keep making up excuses about how busy they were, which only made people try harder and ask if they could book months in advance.

So some got ‘lucky’ when it opened, the first and only to sample The Shed.

To keep up the mystique (and disguise the fact they were being taken through someone’s back garden to an actual shed) he blindfolded them as he led them through to the tables.

For the opening night, Oobah spent £31 buying a stack of ready meals from Iceland.

On the menu was Minestrone Cup a Soup, vegetable lasagna with edible flowers or macaroni cheese with ground truffles. He also got hold of some chickens to tell people they could pick their own to be slaughtered like a lobster.

He served up microwave meals from Iceland (Picture: Getty)

But he forgot that he had listed the restaurant as vegetarian – ‘and when we got a chicken out one person started crying,’ Oobah said.

He had also roped in friends to pretend to be diners having an incredible time, to try and make it seem convincing.

Incredibly, people actually said they had a great time at the restaurant, with one person asking if it would be easier for them to get a table next time now that they had been.

‘Nobody left a bad review,’ Oobah said. ‘It would have been really funny if they had done.’

Despite the success, the restaurant didn’t have a second night – and you won’t find the listening now, as Tripadvisor removed it after he confessed.

We asked Oobah if he had found his true calling with this kind of thing and he agreed – ‘yes, I think it is – wasting people’s time.’

Tripadvisor responded

‘Generally, the only people who create fake restaurant listings are journalists in misguided attempts to test us. As there is no incentive for anyone in the real world to create a fake restaurant it is not a problem we experience with our regular community – therefore this ‘test’ is not a real world example.

‘Most fraudsters are only interested in trying to manipulate the rankings of real businesses – so naturally that is what our content specialists are focused on catching. We use state-of-the-art technology to identify suspicious review patterns, based on modelling of what normal review behaviour looks like. This is why the distinction between attempted fraud by a real business, as opposed to attempted fraud for a non-existent business, is important. Real businesses, whether they try to game our system or not, have a footfall of genuine customers coming through the door and those customers contribute to the review patterns we would expect to see.

‘Our community too can report suspicious activity to us. Again, this is much more likely to occur in real business cases, where genuine customers walk through the door.

‘The bottom line is, if people didn’t find the reviews helpful, they wouldn’t keep coming back to our site. The fact that millions of UK consumers continue to do so is testament to the reliability of our review model.’